of Sligo, who had travelled to Greece with a famous English poet, Lord Byron, and had seen the ancient temple in the bowl of mountain, which reminded him of the area where he’d built a hunting lodge. The Irish Delphi was actually not even a village at all but a townland, a collection of farms where the same families had lived for centuries. Rocky soil, stone walls defining fields, the boreens leading from one small holding to the next, from Tullaglas to Ardmor, winding along the shores of Dhulough, Fin Lough, and the Glenummera River and back into ravines pleated with rock and the odd surprising house built into the side of the hill. As a child, Declan had explored the country surrounding his family’s farm with an enthralled curiosity, returning to his hearth with questions. His parents, born Gaelic speakers who acquired English as a slightly unsavoury but necessary second language, were full of the stories of the townland and its families. Their English used a Gaelic syntax, the past being spoken of in the present, and for years he was puzzled as to whether Padraig Og was an uncle or the brother of a great-great-grandparent, whether the landlord of the area, the Marquess, whose hunting lodge provided work for some local families, was given land directly by Cromwell or was a descendant of your man. Old grudges, old loyalties—they were one and the same. If his family had had reason to shun the Joyces three generations earlier, there was no reason for the present family to speak to a contemporary Joyce.
“What’s Gaelic, Mr. O’Malley?”
“Ah, Rose, the loveliest language that ever was created, the language of the ancient Celtic people who lived in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and some in France and Cornwall, too. Let me think what I can say to you in it so ye’ll get an idea of its music. Well, yes, here’s a bit of poetry.
A bennáin a búiredáin, a béicedáin binn, is binn linn in cúicherán do-ní tú ‘sin glinn. Éolchaire mo mennatáin do-rala ar mo chéill— na lois isin machaire, na h-ois isin t-sléib ...”
He paused.“Do you ye like the sound of it then?”
“Oh, it’s lovely! Like music, or water. What does it mean?” Rose’s face was radiant, and she clasped her hands in front of her in delight. A girl in a shabby dress, her hair braided in two untidy ropes, green eyes alive with the poetry.
Declan thought for a minute, wanting to give her equal joy in an English version. “It means something like this, Rose. I will try to make it poetry as well. It’s from a long poem about a sort of hermit, living on his own after being a prince of Ulster and going mad in battle:
Little antlered one, little belling one,
melodious little bleater,
sweet I think the lowing
that you make in the glen.”
He stopped. “So that’s the first bit, Rose, about a deer or a young stag, I guess. And this is what follows:
Homesickness for my little dwelling
has come upon my mind,
the calves in the plain,
the deer on the moor ...”
Rose exclaimed again and clapped her hands. Declan had seen this in the past, when a girl from a mountain farm, with knowledge of sheep and turf cutting, would hear, in poetry, a chord that struck deep within her heart. He wished it could become more for them than a momentary fragment of joy in the classroom. The future held little poetry for these girls. Marriages would be arranged for some, others would enter service in a country house, some would work in the wool industry in Leenane, carding or spinning or weaving, and most would lose their bloom early with the harsh conditions that awaited them. One young woman in the nearby village had disgraced herself and her family by consorting with an English soldier and had been publicly stripped, her hair shorn, tar roughly painted onto her young body, and the feathers of geese and ducks shaken over her. Declan had known her father and knew the shame that he felt when the young woman left for England and word came back that she was carrying the child of the soldier. He hadn’t heard whether the man took her in or not. He felt such pity for the girl and wished there had been something he could have done besides making his opinion known, in the quiet way he was known for, as he had always done. Sometimes love did not strike in a seemly or proper way—having taught school for years made him alert to the sighs of a boy yearning for a strapping lass twice his size or to the sight of a shadow against a stone wall splitting in two as his presence parted an embrace between a mountain girl, shoeless and clad in homespun, and a lad from a village family.
“Have ye heard of the Famine, Rose, the potato famine in Ireland? My parents called it the Black Hunger.” Declan led the way back to the cabin, carrying a covered dish holding cheese.
She hadn’t, and so he told something of it, how a terrible blight had killed the potato plants overnight, and overnight, seventy-five years ago, life had changed for the Irish forever. Most people depended utterly upon the potato for daily life; a few, like his father’s family, also grew modest crops and animals for market and didn’t fare quite so badly, but they, with their small amount of cash, were the exception. The populations of entire townlands disappeared, villages emptied of their occupants. Those who could fled for America, assisted in some cases by the Crown or by landlords who wanted them off the land, their rents so far in arrears that the landlords pleaded insolvency but still ate regularly, kept good horses who ate precious grains, and sent their children to fine schools. Human dignity was reduced to the lowest possible denominator as cows were bled for the sustenance their blood provided, people fed on grass and the herbs of the fields, fevers raged through the shelters constructed over ditches after the cabins had been tumbled by bailiffs and soldiers, and entire families died with no one to bury or mourn them or keep the dogs from their bodies. Afterwards, people carried the Famine with them like a sacred object, a prayer to protect them against such tragedy again. Declan told Rose what a sad thing it was to come upon the remains of the cabins, roofless, surrounded by thistles, cleansed by decades of wind. Sorrow attached itself to the stones, to the abandoned thresholds, made a syllabary of the grass stalks. Wind said the names quietly—O’Leary, Mannion, Murphy, Cronin. Sometimes a noise would issue from one of the ruined cabins and the young Declan would wait, trembling, until a black-faced mountain sheep trotted out, as startled as he was by the encounter.
Rose was quiet at first, knowing nothing of hunger and perhaps trying to imagine a table without bread or fish or over-wintered potatoes. And all she had known of death was a baby born too early and buried on their property, a jam jar of wild-flowers kept by the small stone, and the kittens her father drowned in a bucket thrown to the shore for eagles.
“Did you have brothers and sisters?” she asked, finally. She silently accepted another slice of currant bread, this time with some cheese, and ate it almost without noticing.
“I had four brothers and three sisters. I was in the middle, a dreamy boy whom they could not keep from books. I am grateful to my parents for not attempting to do so. The Irish have a great respect for learning; before my time, some schoolmasters even set up classes in the shelters of hedges, before the National Schools were built and schooling was made possible for most children, Catholics and Protestants. A way was found to send me from Tullaglas to the priests for further education.”
“How did you get there?” she wondered.
“By donkey-cart, Rose. I’d never been away from home and pined for the first few weeks. We slept in long rooms, fifty boys to a room, and I could not wander the hills as I had in Delphi. I pined for the dog, the ravine behind our cabin, the sound of wind in our fuchsia bushes—as well as my moth-er’s barmbrack ...”
“What’s barmbrack, Mr. O’Malley?”
“A bread like the
